Survey Finds Kubernetes Ripple Effect Widening

A survey of 500 attendees at the recent KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018 conference suggests that early adopters of Kubernetes are now wrestling with many of the downstream issues that ensue after embracing microservices-based applications based on containers to build and deploy applications.

Conducted by Platform9, a provider of managed Kubernetes services, the survey finds the top three concerns conference attendees have are the complexity associated with managing multi-cloud environments, with 34 percent saying they were very concerned about this issue; running stateful applications on Kubernetes, at 33 percent; and the operational complexity associated with managing Kubernetes, at 31 percent.

The multi-cloud issue is becoming problematic because most of the attendees report their organizations are already running Kubernetes in multiple places. A full 65 percent of survey respondents say they need to deploy Kubernetes deployments in an on-premises infrastructure, with Linux-based systems (44 percent) or VMware (22 percent) topping the list.

In terms of public cloud service providers, Amazon Web Services (AWS) leads that pack at 55 percent. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft are essentially tied for second at 34 percent and 33 percent, respectively.

Top use cases for Kubernetes cited by survey respondents are running Web services deployed as microservices was the most popular use case, (73 percent), followed by employing containers as an alternative to virtual machines (55 percent) and taking advantage of serverless computing frameworks or function-as-a-service (FaaS) offerings (40 percent).

The survey also finds that 39 percent of respondents rely in Helm and various types of Operators applications to manage Kubernetes. An almost equal percentage of respondents say they are responsible for designing and developing Kubernetes-based applications or operating these applications in a production environment A total of 41 percent identified themselves as being responsible for both the Dev and the Ops side of a Kubernetes environment.

Conference attendees are also far along when it comes to embracing a variety of Kubernetes-related technologies. Most widely adopted complementary Kubernetes technologies include container Registries (73 percent), Prometheus monitoring software (53 percent) and application programming interface (API) gateways (50 percent). The top three technologies being evaluated by conference attendees are Istio service mesh (52 percent), distributed tracking (32 percent) and Prometheus (31 percent).

Platform9 CEO Sirish Raghuram says the survey makes it clear that when it comes Kubernetes there’s a lot of diversity to contend with. In addition, it’s clear IT organizations are now starting to wrestle with the potential impact Kubernetes will have on DevOps processes. In some cases, management of applications and operations is being further unified. But Kubernetes also presents an opportunity to embrace a common framework that makes it easier to separate engineering concerns between application developers and IT operations teams.

It may take a whole for the impact Kubernetes will have on enterprise IT to fully manifest itself. But early indications suggest it’s likely Kubernetes will soon have the more profound impact on IT processes than any other platform since the introduction of the virtual machine.